The Myth of Making It

This morning while driving the kids to school, I heard one of the disc jockeys (I’m old school and still listen to the radio) talking about a recent survey reporting more than three quarters of Americans have not “made it” financially.

The number they were using as the baseline for making it was a net worth of at least $234,000.

This was, of course, no surprise. Not the number but the fact that few have actually reached such an apex. Nor was what came next: an admission from both voices on the radio that they, too, had not “made it.”

What did strike me was what one of the DJs said after that: “Well, you know, that’s the American dream. Gotta keep grinding.”

As a former, shall we say, grinder—as someone who has been accustomed to waking up most mornings and checking email before brushing his teeth; as a man who spent a couple decades working day and night, never feeling caught up; as someone who has spent, and still spends, a good chunk of his day carting kids around from school to activities to home and all points in between—I am tired of grinding.

Tired of pushing.

Tired of striving.

Tired of the continual ballet of believing no matter what I do, it is never enough, and that I have no choice but to keep going.

Because I have been grinding long enough, so long, in fact, that I have been ground. There now sits in my chest a constriction that won’t go away. My ears ring in the background of daily life. Once or twice a week, without much reason, I wake up in the middle of the night, feeling afraid, and can’t go back to sleep.

Even though I don’t own a smartphone and limit my work week now, I still feel anxious most days. A little uneasy about, well, most things. And I have learned that I am not alone. Everyone I know is a bit tired, spread too thin, a little fidgety about nothing. It’s as if we all feel like there’s something undone but can’t figure out what it is.

It probably has something to do with that classic dream:

You’re back in college. It’s senior year and you’ve got two weeks before you graduate. Then you realize: oh, no. There was a class you forgot to attend all semester. And now you remember, but it’s too late.

You wake up, sweating. Maybe, for you, it’s high school instead of college, your first military deployment or job. Whatever the setting, the plot is the same. You’ve neglected something important, and there is no way of making it up. This, I think, is the condition of most people. There is something we need to do, and we aren’t sure what it is, but if we just stay busy enough, we might find it.

So we keep grinding. We keep going. We keep believing.

This is the American Dream, and it’s been exported to realms beyond America. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad dream. There is something powerful about hope, about improving oneself, something compelling to the idea that a person can do anything, be anything, accomplish whatever they want.

But it is still a dream. A fantasy. A ghost story haunting how we spend our days. And dreams must be put in their place. Because if seventy-five percent of the population feels they have made it, then is making it really the point?

If you have ever run a marathon, you know there is little time spent at the finish line. The purpose of the race is not to win it but run it. As cliche as it sounds, yes, the journey is the destination. Or at least it can be.

There are activities in life that do, not so that we can be done with them, but so that we can keep doing them. This is, of course, the difference between infinite and finite games:

An infinite game is a game where the goal is to keep playing.

In a finite game, the goal is to win. To be done.

I’m not sure about the American Dream, but I believe existence is an infinite game, one where the point is not to make it but to keep it going.

What does all this have to do with Cyber Monday?

Well, everything.

This is the day when you are told to rush. To not miss anything. This is your last chance, final warning, etc. I don’t have any problem with a deal or with buying things for that matter. But I do have a problem with how we talk about these things. Because it seems to me that the process of buying things and consuming them is predicated on a few powerful ideas:

1. You do not have enough.

2. You need more so that you can get enough.

3. Eventually, you will have enough—and everything will be okay.

I am reminded of the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton’s character says after his apartment is blown up, remarking on everything he’s lost (sofa, wardrobe, decent stereo): “I was close to being complete.”

There is no shortage of self-help memes on the Internet assuring you that you are good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit people like you. But, I am beginning to wonder, what if enough was not the point of the game? What if there was no completeness? What then?

We might start having to live a little differently in the case.

But for now, fortunately, there is shopping. ;)

As a fellow human, I am not immune to the hope of being or having enough, believing that one more possession will aid my journey in completion. This weekend, I was eying a handful of deals online, items that were marked twenty, thirty, and even fifty percent off. I wanted to buy them, they were on sale at couldn’t-be-missed prices, but I didn’t. Black Friday came and went, and the deals were still on Sale come Saturday, now marked as a Cyber Monday offers.

Okay, I thought. Now I understand how this game works:

1. Pretend you do not have enough.

2. Strive to get more.

3. Never stop striving.

I do not think there is anything wrong with this game, per se, but it is a game. And games, by definition, are not life-and-death scenario. They require, relatively speaking, low stakes. Yes, you could gamble away your life’s savings at a casino, but generally most games are meant to be fun. A thing experienced, not conquered. My friends who are serious gamblers understand even that.

When we treat the trivial as something serious, we not only delude ourselves. We create our own personal hell. What happens, I wonder, to a person who goes through each and every day, believing they will never be, have, or do enough?

That is a person who can never rest, who can never stop, who can never be complete. Such a person might actually, eventually, lose their mind—and life.

I wish I could say this was all hyperbole and not so serious. But I believe it is serious. I lost a friend earlier this year to suicide, a father of three, devoted husband, successful businessman. He was a busy guy, and I heard he was stressed about medical bills for his parents and struggling with finances in his business.

You can never say for sure what drives a person to such a place, and it would be glib to speculate, but for me, it was a wake-up call. “We can’t keep living like this,” I said to my wife. “It kills people.” And we slowed things down even more after that.

Yes, I think a lot of us are living unsustainably, hurrying from one thing to the next, believing the lie that it’ll never be enough, that we have to keep going, that there is no “out” but death.

And this is, quite frankly, killing us, often in very subtle ways. We are losing our minds. We are losing our bodies and sense of peace, gaining the whole world and forgetting our souls. We have been tricked into playing the game of hustle and striving, of endless grinding, thinking it will lead to our ever being done.

It won’t.

So what’s left to do?

Stop? Maybe.

Slow down? Probably.

But even more than that, perhaps more realistically, what we need to do is change our understanding of the game we’re in.

The point of a problem isn’t to solve it. Because what happens once one problem is gone? Another, inevitably, will come. We all have our problems, and they’re not going away any time soon.

But most people I know hate their problems. They complain about them like a bad spouse, bringing up the issue whenever and with whomever they can. “There’s just nothing I can do,” we seem to say. Nothing but suffer. But that does not sound like a game to me—and if a game, not a very fun one.

Perhaps, though, we don’t have to solve or despair of our problems. Perhaps we can enjoy them. We can appreciate the challenge of attempting to solve them.

It’s a tall order to not take our burdens quite so seriously, but I wonder if it’s worth entertaining. I don’t know for sure that it’s possible to be human and not get wrapped up in all of our melodramas, many of which seemingly don’t amount to anything dire, but there seems to be evidence that it is at least possible.

After all, there are those intrepid souls who have gone before us, who seem to understand that the point of life is not to “make it.” These may be few, but we keep meeting them throughout history—poets and philosophers, enlightened masters and avid enthusiasts of the game of being alive, those intelligent beings wise enough to not get lost in the blue haze of a screen forever—and they keep saying the same:

Life can feel light.

Existence can be enjoyed.

You don’t have to grind.

This is something I think is possible. It is a hope I earnestly have. I guess that’s my American Dream. And I wonder if I’ll make it.

P.S. Yes, the link at the end of the Black Friday post was correct (if you know, you know).

P.P.S. I am teaching two more writing classes before the end of the year and bundling those together at a 90% discount. The offer is good through Friday. See details here.

P.P.P.S. A couple client books are out or coming out soon:

• Retirement Starts Today by Benjamin Brandt—a great, short read that has already impacted me and challenged me to start thinking about how I want the second half of my life to go, and living that reality, now. This book is available for pre-order and only 99 cents today.

• Aristotle for Novelists by Douglas Vigliotti—a quick but fascinating exploration of Aristotle’s Poetics (which I knew nothing about before working on / reading this book) that has me thinking differently, not just about story but about life. Available and also for only 99 cents this week.

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